This Christmas Carol is All About the Cuban Missile Crisis

Whitney Houston. Sufjan Stevens. Carrie Underwood. Kenny G. What do all of these musicians have in common? They’ve all performed a Christmas carol about the Cuban Missile Crisis!

The now-classic song is “Do You Hear What I Hear?” Originally written in October 1962 during the US and USSR’s nuclear stand-off, the original songwriters never thought the song would become a holiday hit.

And surely no one could’ve anticipated that a ’60s protest song would become duet fodder for Rosie O’Donnell and Elmo:

In 1962, the original composers—married songwriting duo Gloria Shayne Baker and Noël Regney—were asked to compose a simple B-side to a Christmas song for Columbia Records.

But the tense political climate at the time due to the threat of nuclear war inspired Regney to write a musical plea for peace instead.

In Ridgefield Chronicles, author Jack Sanders quotes the songwriter discussing the real inspiration for this song:

“I had thought I’d never write a Christmas song: Christmas had become so commercial. But this was the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the studio, the producer was listening to the radio to see if we had been obliterated.”

Perhaps in part due to the more serious lyrical content, Columbia passed on “Do You Hear What I Hear.” But, as Sanders notes in his book, Mercury Records was quick to pick it up, upgrading the single from a B-side to an A-side.

For the performer, Mercury cast Harry Simeone Chorale, famous for its 1958 recording of “The Little Drummer Boy.” The result was an instant earworm:

It’s easy to see how the original, pacifist meaning was lost over time, despite fairly overt lyrics like “Pray for peace, people everywhere!”

On November 20, 1962, the US officially ended its naval blockade of Cuba—so the song debuted after the formal end to the crisis, distancing the lyrics from their initial subject.

Though the initial recording by Harry Simeone Chorale was a regional hit, it wasn’t until Bing Crosby’s cover in 1963 that it became an international success. But the all-powerful Crosby bump also solidified the song’s status as a more generically Jesus-themed Christmas song:

The B-side of Crosby’s recording,”Christmas Dinner Country Style,” also had nothing to do with nuclear war.

And the other songs getting regular radio airplay at the time were almost all whimsical holiday tunes like Carla Thomas’ “Gee Whiz, It’s Christmas,” Paul & Paula’s “Holiday Hootenanny,” and, of course, the high-pitched ditties from David Seville & the Chipmunks.

Twenty-three years after the original release of “Do You Hear What I Hear,” Noël Regney shared in an interview with The New York Times his frustration that the song’s meaning had been corrupted:

“I am amazed that people can think they know the song—and not know it is a prayer for peace. But we are so bombarded by sound and our attention spans are so short that we now listen only to catchy beginnings.”

So what started as a song about the Cuban Missile Crisis might’ve morphed into a more commercialized Christmas carol, but now it’s acquired a third meaning—as an anthem for the disconnect between how songwriters originally intended their work to how people actually perceive it.